N

This article is about the letter. For other uses, see N (disambiguation).

N (named en /ˈɛn/) is the fourteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.

History of the forms

One of the most common hieroglyphs, snake, was used in Egyptian writing to stand for a sound like the English ⟨J⟩, because the Egyptian word for "snake" was djet. It is speculated by many that Semitic people working in Egypt adapted hieroglyphics to create the first alphabet, and that they used the same snake symbol to represent N, because their word for "snake" may have begun with that sound. However, the name for the letter in the Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic alphabets is nun, which means "fish" in some of these languages. The sound value of the letter was /n/—as in Greek, Etruscan, Latin and all modern languages.

Egyptian hieroglyph for J	Phoenician nun	Etruscan N	Greek Nu

Usage

N represents a dental or alveolar nasal in virtually all languages that use the Latin alphabet, and in the International Phonetic Alphabet. A common digraph with 'n' is 'ng', which represents a velar nasal in a variety of languages, usually positioned word-finally in English. Often, before a velar plosive (as in ink or jungle), 'n' alone represents a velar nasal. In Italian and French, 'gn' represents a palatal nasal (/ɲ/). The Portuguese and Vietnamese spelling for this sound is 'nh', while Spanish and a few other languages use the letter 'ñ'. In English, 'n' is generally silent when it is preceded by an 'm' at the end of words, as in hymn; however, 'n' is pronounced in this combination when occurring word medially, as in hymnal.

'n' is the sixth most common letter and the second-most commonly used consonant in the English language (after 't').

In mathematics, the italic form (n) is the common symbol for a variable quantity, especially one which represents an integer. $\mathbb {N}$ is often used to refer to the set of natural numbers.

In statistics, the italic form (n) is used to denote the number of observations or replicates included in a statistical sample.

In chemistry, N represents the element Nitrogen. In biochemistry, N is the one-letter code symbol for the amino acid asparagine. It is also the symbol for the SI unit of force, the newton.

There is some fonts / typefaces of "N n" can look like an upside-down "U u".

Related letters and other similar characters

• Ν ν : Greek letter Nu
• П п (П п) : Cyrillic letter Pe
• Н н (Н н) : Cyrillic letter En
• И и (И и) : Cyrillic letter I
• Ń ń : Latin letter N with acute
• Ñ ñ : Latin letter N with tilde
• Ň ň : Latin letter N with caron

Computing codes

Character information

Preview	N		n
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N		LATIN SMALL LETTER N
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	78	U+004E	110	U+006E
UTF-8	78	4E	110	6E
Numeric character reference	N	N	n	n
EBCDIC family	213	D5	149	95
ASCII 1	78	4E	110	6E

¹ Also for encodings based on ASCII, including the DOS, Windows, ISO-8859 and Macintosh families of encodings.

Other representations

NATO phonetic	Morse code
November

		File:Sign language .svg	File:BSL letter .svg
Signal flag	Flag semaphore	American manual alphabet (ASL fingerspelling)	British manual alphabet (BSL fingerspelling)	Braille dots-1345 Unified English Braille

External links

• Media related to N at Wikimedia Commons
• The dictionary definition of N at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of n at Wiktionary